Radar Reveals Hidden Monuments At Stonehenge

Seventeen previously unknown monuments have been found around Stonehenge, dramatically altering the prevailing view of the neolithic site as a solitary masterpiece, visited only by Druidic high priests.

Instead, it is revealed as a busy spiritual centre, with people coming and going to more than 60 locations to fulfil their religious obligations.

“This is not just another find,” said Professor Vince Gaffney of the University of Birmingham. “It’s going to change how we understand Stonehenge.”

The seventeen circles, which range up to 30 metres in diameter, plus dozens of smaller shrines and pits, were discovered scattered across Salisbury Plain by the most extensive geophysical survey of a prehistoric site ever, involving magnetometers, ground penetrating radar and measurements of electrical resistance.

Stonehenge has company (Credit: LBI Arch Pro)

Together with other techniques, they have painted a 3D map of the landscape that links Stonehenge to its environs. “Most of the area around Stonehenge had never been explored,” said Professor Gaffney, the chair in landscape archaeology and geomatics. “This is the ultimate archaeological map.”

Paul Garwood, a senior lecturer in archaeology at the university and member of the interpretation team, told Forbes.com: “This is the new baseline. All future work must refer to this point of departure.”

The four-year survey, led by researchers from the University of Birmingham and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Vienna, also discovered a possible link between the stone circle and its nearest neighbour, a three-kilometre ditch and bank structure called the Cursus.

Two pits on the Cursus – so named because early archaeologists thought it was a Roman horse racing course – are precisely aligned to mark the sunrise and sunset on Midsummer’s day as seen from the heel stone at Stonehenge.

Raised ground in front of the western point obscures the line of sight, suggesting it may have been marked by a post or the smoke from a fire.

It is the first time archaeologists have tied Stonehenge astronomically to other features in the landscape. “They had a spatial relationship,” said Professor Gaffney during his presentation of the team’s preliminary results at the British Science Festival.

Possibly the biggest surprise was a line of up to 60 buried stone pillars, 330 metres long, inside the bank of a large, bowl-shaped feature called Durrington Walls, Britain’s largest henge, which sits beside the River Avon. The three-metre stones are laid horizontally inside the mound, but could have stood vertically in neolithic times.

A mound between Durrington Walls and Stonehenge has been revealed as a 6,000-year-old, 33-metre long, wooden House of the Dead, similar to structures from the same period in what is now Eastern England which show signs of ritual practices including excarnation, in which the skin and organs of the deceased were removed.

The team has also discovered Bronze Age burial mounds, Iron-age tombs and more recent remains, including the site of a First World War airfield and practice trenches, and the neo-Druid festivals that were conducted around Stonehenge in the 20th Century. “The only reason we can see them is that they dropped beer caps,” said Professor Gaffney, adding that they are being treated as worshipers too.

The equipment used on the 12 square kilometre English Heritage site was cutting edge, some of it built the week before it was used. In one case, when a mobile carrier for an instrument “exploded”, Professor Gaffney had to recruit engineers from a nearby dairy operation to repair it.

Stonehenge was built 4,600 years ago, about a century before the introduction of copper from Ireland and the subsequent dawn of the bronze-age in about 2150BC.

Also involved in the project were researchers from the universities of Bradford, St Andrews, Nottingham, and Ghent.

I’ve been a working journalist for more than a quarter of a century, much of it freelance, with a particular interest in science, technology and medicine. My experience includes writing for The Economist’s science section, The Independent on Sunday, The Telegraph, New Scient...